When President Obama announced that high-speed rail would be a part of the 2009 economic stimulus program, Illinois immediately applied for federal funding for a high- (really moderate-) speed rail route from Chicago to St. Louis. According to the application (54 megabytes), the state would double track the existing line, owned mostly by Union Pacific, and run trains at up to 110 miles per hour. It would also increase the frequency of those trains from five to eight per day.
The state predicted that ridership would more than double from 521,000 trips year in 2008 to 1,210,000 trips in 2014, the first full year of operation. By 2018, the fifth full year, ridership would further increase to 1,339,000. (The application is actually inconsistent about how many riders were carried in 2008; page 33 says 521,000 while page 59 says 881,000. According to Amtrak, it was 476,000.)
So how well has that worked out? According to Amtrak’s FY 2018 performance report, ridership on the Chicago-St. Louis trains had grown to 586,200 trips in 2018. That’s 23 percent more than Amtrak’s number for 2008, but 56 percent short of the projected ridership.
What happened? The short answer is that, despite having spent at least $2 billion, Illinois not only didn’t meet the target of having the faster trains in operation by 2014, they still aren’t in operation today. Amtrak is still running five trains a day and they haven’t cut even one minute from the 2008 timetable.
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The state is promising that it will have trains in operation sometime in 2019. But it made the same promise for last year and the year before. Moreover, even when it gets the trains going, they won’t go 110 miles per hour; instead, the top speed will be 90 mph and the average speed will only be 63 mph, if that. Even at a top speed of 110, the average would be less than 73 mph.
According to the application, the state was hoping to get 3 percent of cars off the road and 15 percent of air travelers onto trains instead. Given the slower speeds, the trains will fall well short of those goals. Of course, no one should celebrate when a heavily subsidized government train manages to steal passengers from minimally subsidized for-profit airlines (most air travel subsidies go to small airports, not airports like O’Hare, Midway, or Lambert).
Illinois’ experience shows that high- and even moderate-speed trains are a lot more complicated and difficult to implement than proponents claim. Even if Illinois ever gets the trains running, the best that can be said for them is that they will replace cheap transportation with expensive transportation. The only winners are the contractors who built the new tracks and the Union Pacific, which gets a big increase in its freight capacity at virtually no cost to itself.
AP; The only winners are the contractors who built the new tracks and the Union Pacific, which gets a big increase in its freight capacity at virtually no cost to itself.
THWM; Truckers get their infrastructure mostly paid for from property taxes and isn’t expected to be profitable to survive :$
trucks primarily use highways and highway costs are mostly covered by user fees (fuel taxes) so I don’t know what you think you’re talking about.
Google Maps has the 300-mile Chicago—St. Louis trip via I-55 at 4.5 hours, or 67mph average. They also list a 1.5 hour flight but you have to tack on, what, two hours to the front of that and an hour on the back? Turning the flight into a 4.5 hour trip, the same as a car. But in the case of the both the train and the flight, you still need to pay for local transportation after you get there while with the car the only extra cost is the marginal, per-mile rate.
This trip would be an excellent one with an AV, giving all the comfort of a train or plane and all the convenience and privacy of a personal car.
A lot of Obama’s so-called HSR plan in the short term was little more than pork for private companies. Back in the day there was a stink as Iowa pulled out of it’s portion of what would be a new train running from Chicago to Iowa City. It wasn’t high speed rail but promised to be.
Luckily for Iowegians, the governor and legislature realized it didn’t make sense to spend hundreds of millions for a handful of people to ride the train to Chicago instead of Megabus. It would’ve give the Iowa Interstate Railroad – a Class II making a go of much of the old Rock Island line from Omaha – Chicago – a nice revenue source. More importantly it would’ve had the state paying for a lot of upgrades to IAIS’ infrastructure. Not a bad deal for them but not a good deal for the public.